Chinese researchers have built the world's fastest supercomputer, which is almost 50 percent more powerful than its predecessor.

The Tianhe-1A, based at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China, can perform over 2.5 thousand trillion floating point operations per second (petaflops).

Professor Jack Dongarra, who is a member of the Top500 supercomputer ranking project, told ZDNet UK that he had been present when NUDT tested the Tianhe-1A supercomputer at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin.